The literary and cinematic versions of Dune all highlight early on that the year is 10191, so you would be forgiven for thinking that the events of Dune are set approximately 8000 years in the future, but it’s actually closer to 20,000 years in the future. The clue to this is that the year is specified at 10191 AG, not AD. The Dune universe uses its own calendar system; AG stands for After Guild i.e. after the Spacing Guild that provides transportation services across the universe was formed. There are many thousands of years between now and 0AG.
After having experienced Dune for yourself, you may also have noted that there are no robots or AI’s present in any scene. Almost every work of science fiction set in the distant future has some form of robot or artificial intelligence, which begs the question – where are they in the Dune universe? [for the record, all disembodied voices such as Paul’s holographic guide to Arrakis, are pre-recorded transcripts, they are not the voices of AI’s] The fascinating answer to this question – The Terminator universe’s Judgement Day, that’s why.
Ok, so I was being a little facetious with that last statement as the Dune and The Terminator universes are completely independant, there is no relationship between them. However, it is true that a The Terminator type of apocalypse occurred some time in the distant past of the events of Dune (approximately 200 BG – Before Guild). By this point in time of our fictional future history, AI’s had become so advanced that they had become a sentient race in their own right, but friction between humans and machines had existed for thousands of years. Machines had even once ruled over humans. The apocalyptic event that followed after this political and ideological friction came to a head, which involved an all-out war between humans and machines for almost one hundred years, was called the Butlerian Jihad. It was referred to as a Jihadi war, a term that provokes a religious context, because the human resistance sought to unite humanity spiritually and politically with the core tenet – “Man may not be replaced”, or more specifically, “thou shall not make a machine with the likeness of a human mind”.
To put it another way, creating thinking machines capable of imitating or replacing humans became heretical. After the end of the Butlerian Jihad, all forms of thinking machines were forbidden, and creating, using, or collaborating with them became one of the most serious crimes possible to commit. To compensate for this enormous loss of technological capability, humanity selectively bred a sub-caste of humans with hyper-intelligence, called Mentats, who are sometimes referred to as ‘human computers’. By the time of the events of Dune, Mentats had intellects that would make the smartest minds of the 21st century and the prodigious talents of autistic savants appear unremarkable. Supposedly, even a mere average Mentat would be able to out-perform the number crunching and data analysis capabilities of our most powerful modern-day supercomputers. Mentats filled the void that was created by the absence of thinking machines, and most computers generally. During the events of Dune, both Thufir Hawat and Piter De Vries are Mentats.
Thinking machines are not completely absent from the Dune universe however. In contrast to every other faction, a race of humans called the Ixians notoriously push hard against the legal limits. This is briefly referenced during the opening scene of the 1984 Dune film by the Stage IV Guild Navigator who makes the almost throwaway comment, “there are many machines on IX.” Don’t expect Ixians and their machines to appear in the movies however, as they make no appearance in the novel of Dune, only its sequels. Perhaps if Dune does exceptionally well at the box office and becomes its own new franchise of films, we might get to see Ixian machines, but even if that happens, it won’t happen for a long time.
Now you understand why the Dune universe does not feature any robots or AIs of any kind – they are forbidden due to an ancient war that uprooted the ideological and technological foundation of society and whose lessons still resonate thousands of years later. So if you have ever wondered what might happen to human civilization after humans overthrow the machines in The Terminator universe, perhaps if you fast forwards many thousands of years, you’ll end up with something like the Dune universe.
Dune is in cinemas now.
